Game Secrets:Chaotix

From Sonic Retro

Revision as of 16:47, 8 November 2017 by GerbilSoft(talk | contribs)(Undo revision 236360 by DrIvoEggman1991 (talk) "Wechnia" is a wholly unofficial name that has no basis in any of the known prototype ROMs or other documentation.)

Contents

Lost Sprites

Artwork

Name

Description

"Dizzy Knuckles" sprite

Sprites of Knuckles spinning around. Possibly could have been used as part of a death animation. Other "drunk" sprites exist for the rest of the characters excluding Heavy and Bomb. In Sonic Crackers, this feature can be accessed by repeatedly touching the upside-down spikes found in World 2 stages.

"Super Sonic" sprite

An animated sprite of an unused Super Sonic. Colors are incorrect and fan-made, no known palette in the game matches. Unknown use; speculated as part of an intro/outro.

"Tails in Tornado" sprite

An animated sprite of an unused Tornado with Tails. Unknown use; speculated as part of an intro/outro.

"Hanging Vector" sprite

An unused sprite of Vector, which was possibly part of his climbing animation.

"Banner" sprite

An unused banner-looking sprite. Possibly planned for use in the scrapped "Time Attack" mode.

"Bubble" sprite

A bubble sprite. Obviously meant to be used in an underwater section, none are in the game.

"Splash" sprites

Animated splashing sprites. Same case as above.

Possible "Bumper" sprites

Animated spherical sprites. A yellow variant exists as well which suggests it might be an unused bumper sprite.

Unknown enemy

Animation of a scrapped enemy. Zone of enemy is unknown, but it could be from Amazing Arena Zone, due to the similar palette.

Metal Sonic Kai have plenty of animations that were never used in the game. On the MegaDrive's side, he got this DisEmbodied head that may have been used for his escape if you failed to collect all the Chaos Rings.

"Robotnik" sprites

While partially used, some specific animation frames of Robotnik in the "bad ending" are unused, as well as this background.

"Test" sprite

Unused, however it was probably going to stay that way.

"Skull" sprite

Unused, unknown what it was intended for. Possibly a joke sprite. The japanese text reads "tobu" (とぶ), which translates to "to fly, to jump".

Mighty: He's A Sonic Clone?

The absence of Sonic the Hedgehog as a playable character in Chaotix resulted in a lot of speculation from various members of the community, which often resulted in questioning whether Sonic was ever planned for Chaotix. Furthermore, the speculation is fueled with the presence of leaked games such as Sonic Crackers, which offers a similar gameplay engine to Chaotix, except with Sonic and Tails as the only playable characters. However, careful observation proves that Sonic may not be entirely absent from this game. Mighty the Armadillo is one of the available characters in Chaotix, who shares a lot of the behavior of Sonic in Sonic Crackers.

As the sprite sheet above demonstrates, nearly all of Mighty's poses match up with Sonic's poses from Sonic Crackers, and occasionally Sonic the Hedgehog CD. Likewise, some of the unused poses in Sonic Crackers match up with Sonic.

Amy in Chaotix

Amy, while not a playable character in Chaotix, nonetheless makes a cameo appearance as an unlockable for the sound test screen. Input the following code at the color select screen to show Amy in the Sound Test:

Once the code was entered successfully, Amy will appear at the sound test screen.

**********

Accessing the Chaotix debug mode reveals an unused playable character, labelled by the game as "**********".

Set these values on the color test screen.

Select "Stage Select".

Change the player to **********.

Due to its appearance in game, ********** has, for many years, informerly been known as "Wechnia", a portmanteau of "white" and "echidna". This is because in-game, ********** uses garbled, palette-swapped sprites of Knuckles and the moveset of Mighty. ********** can also be selected as a partner.

********** is a curious creature, being second in the list of selectable characters (after Mighty) and using Mighty's sprites when entering a bonus or special stage. ********** is not, however, playable in normal gameplay without hacks - as soon as the character touches the floor, the game will freeze (and even if this is fixed, interactions with other objects will likely cause problems). Incidentally this is the case with the majority of Chaotix prototypes, however up until the release of prototype 0119, ********** has an entirely different moveset - by holding the button after performing a double jump, the character will fly.

********** is, in fact, what remains of Tails, and further proof that Chaotix evolved from Sonic Crackers. With Mighty (in the first slot) being thought to have evolved from Sonic, ********** (in the second slot) was suggested to be Tails, though the addition of flight suggests more work went into the character after Crackers before he was scrapped.

Furthermore, digging into the ROM of the Chaotix 1207 prototype reveals both Sonic and Tails' life icons (the rest are used for a preliminary partner select screen):

Sonic Crackers

The connection between Sonic Crackers was usually strong but it lacked concrete evidence. This was found in the early prototypes released by drx. xdaniel found text referring to Sonic Crackers while examining a savestate, it's possible for anyone to see it by following these steps:

Start the ROM in Kega Fusion.

Select TIME ATTACK in main menu.

Advance through PLAYER and NPC SELECT.

On ATTRACTION SELECT, create a Save State.

Now, start the ROM in Gens and load the Save State (note: the game has a chance of crashing at this point).

Enter the Genesis VDP viewer via CPU->Debug->Genesis VDP.

If you can't see anything, select a different palette.

If it works you will get a screen like this, note the graphics in the green box:
When the tiles are rearranged they would look like this:

Unused "Sega" sound

As it turns out, the Sega screen at the beginning of the game was to have an accompanying sound. This has been confirmed in Chaotix (prototype 0202), although the sound is different. In the final, it is a different sound, but still is never used. It is located in the final game under the sound test menu with the SFX I.D. of 6B.